Top HR metrics that can help you cut cost of hiring, retention

To keep your hiring process from draining your budget, it’s important to work closely with HR to retain and recruit talent cost effectively.

But since most HR pros aren’t numbers people, they might not know what areas to review with you. Paychex’s recent report, 14 HR Metrics Your Finance Team Should Be Tracking, offers insight about which elements need your attention.

Vital numbers that impact costs

When you’re looking for cash drains in your recruiting process, be sure HR can give you figures such as:

• Cost-per-hire, including both internal costs (recruiting team salaries, employee referral bonuses) and external costs (job postings, background checks)
• Time-to-fill, which is the average number of days it takes you to hire new employees from the first job posting to accepting your offer
• Average time to full productivity, a metric that HR can generally measure by dividing the average number of days it takes a new employee to meet productivity goals by the number of months from their hire date till the date they meet their goals
• Total training investment, a measurement that’s especially helpful if you can also get info from your peers about how much they’re spending on training to compare results
• Training performance differential, which measures how much worker productivity improves after training against the training cost
• Employee turnover, especially your new-hire turnover rates, so you can see whether there are spikes at certain times during the year (e.g., bonus time)

Other important metrics

There are also other metrics Payroll and HR can pull together that’ll give you more insight into recruiting and retention, such as:

• Absenteeism rate, a helpful metric since there’s a direct correlation between employees’ absences and their productivity at work
• Total cost of workforce, which HR can determine by looking at the costs associated with employees (including wages, overtime pay and benefits) over a specific time period (e.g., weekly, monthly, yearly)